This story was originally published in the Ensemble guest-edited issue of Sunday magazine.
When Tāmaki Makaurau was put into a 140 day lockdown in August last year, my favourite items of clothing were 219km away at a Coromandel beach house we’d borrowed for the year.
It was a fate worse than lockdown 1.0 when I’d had no flour, yeast or gin. Without the fluffy powder blue and polka dot chenille bathrobe my godmother bought me after the birth of my first son, 14 years earlier. Without the knee high Uggs that photographer Karen Inderbitzen-Waller bought me when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003 (yes, I was a child. Check your breasts).
And without the cotton T-shirt swing dress I bought from Kowtow in 2014 and wear like a much-loved housedress, a symbol that signifies my literal shedding of a work day. I was bereft and estranged from the comfort I needed to stay grounded. These are some of my most treasured fashion pieces and I never want to be so far away from them again.
As someone who’s worked ‘in’ fashion for most of my adult life I’ve never thought of myself as being ‘in fashion’ (it’s likely many would agree. Especially my particularly caustic tweens).
And as I’ve pondered the meaning of the word over the past few years - partly pandemic related but also due to getting older, shifting priorities, sustainability issues, gaining a more nuanced understanding of race and cultural issues and the like - I’ve subconsciously peeled back the layers of what fashion means to me to stare deep into its very core. That is what I dip into for comfort and joy instead of base appearance. I like to think this spirit of curiosity around fashion informs much of what we do at Ensemble.
It’s not about clothing. It’s about the memories we create with it, the stories we choose to tell through it and the capturing of time and place that makes it so special, and universal. People may think they don’t care about fashion, but that in and of itself is a fashion statement.
Buying things for a special occasion never instills in me such wonderful associations as when I accidentally create memories through what I wear. Sure, some items and memories are extra special.
A treasured piece that will forever hang in my wardrobe is a Kate Sylvester faux-fur coat, bought on the way home from a much-stressed about mammogram, as a reward for being 15 years cancer-free. Only thing is, I was so high on valium and exhilarated from the ordeal that I promptly forgot my purchase, only to discover it in the boot of my car a week later. Later, I wore it to a party at LA’s Chateau Marmont and Margot Robbie stroked it and told me how much she loved it (I understood after I watched I, Tonya).
Under the coat I was wearing a black strapless drop-waist voluminous Georgia Alice silk dress that the year previously I’d worn to dine at the Noma restaurant pop-up in Tulum, Mexico, and the year prior to that I’d worn it to eat the best sticky pork ribs of my life at a roadside BBQ stand in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
But as with my ugg boots and chenille robe, it’s what the clothing says about me and the life I’m living in it that matters the most. A current favourite is a swimsuit I was wearing when I finally jumped off a cliff near the Coromandel, that I’d been staring down the precipice of for many years.
The notion of fashion as an elitist yardstick by which to measure status and clout is as tired a trope as thinking there are fashion rules that should and shouldn’t be followed, or, things that different people should and shouldn’t wear (cultural appropriation notwithstanding).
My sons, now 14 and 12, like to think they don’t care about fashion. But I couldn’t pay them to wear something they didn’t want to, so joke’s on them. Fashion is a political statement, a vote for the world you want to live in, a mood-changer, a cashmere (or chenille) embrace and a conduit of confidence. It’s anything but fickle.
